White House to release Kagan theses

The White House says it soon will release two theses Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan wrote while attending Princeton and Oxford — ending a game of cat-and-mouse that erupted on the Web after Princeton asked a conservative website to remove her thesis for copyright reasons.

Some conservative critics contend that Kagan's 1981 Princeton thesis — called “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933” — shows Kagan's allegiance to, or at the very least her affinity for radicalism, a notion Kagan’s supporters reject.

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Conservative website RedState.com posted the thesis, but on Friday a Princeton archivist, Daniel Linke, e-mailed Red State, asking that the full text of the thesis be removed from the site, citing copyright laws. Red State subsequently removed the full text, but other sites quickly reposted it.

Now the White House says it will release the 130-page Princeton thesis, as well as one Kagan wrote at Oxford on the exclusionary rule, which regards illegally seized evidence.

“In addition to requesting an expedited release of the documents from the Clinton White House detailed in [White House counsel Bob] Bauer’s letter, the White House will make available copies of Kagan’s theses from Princeton and Oxford,” a White House official said.

“These documents were not specifically requested by the Judiciary Committee in the questionnaire, but demonstrating our commitment to transparency, they will be made available to the committee and the public regardless.”

The copyright in the thesis likely belongs to Kagan, not Princeton. The paper Kagan wrote to get her undergraduate degree in history has been widely discussed on the Internet and in news accounts for a couple of weeks. The Daily Princetonian wrote about it in detail back on May 3, a full week before President Barack Obama formally announced Kagan's nomination to the high court. It was also reported and commented upon when Kagan was on the Supreme Court short list last spring and when she was nominated as Solicitor General earlier in the year.

"Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism's glories than of socialism's greatness. Conformity overrides dissent; the desire to conserve has overwhelmed the urge to alter," Kagan wrote. About the internal strife that befell socialists in New York City, she observed: "The story is a sad, but also a chastening one for those, who more than a half-century after socialism's decline, still wish to change America. ... American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope."

Kagan’s thesis adviser, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz, has rejected claims that the thesis shows Kagan shows support for socialism. "Elena Kagan is about the furthest thing from a socialist. Period. And always had been. Period,” Wilentz told the Princetonian.

On Newsweek.com, Seth Cotter Wells agreed: “What if, 29 years ago, when Kagan was researching the dismal outputs of fierce radicalism as a vehicle for left-liberal political change, she came down with the moderates as opposed to the radicals? … [I]t's at least as compelling a hypothesis as one born from reading only the acknowledgments and conclusion from her senior thesis.”

At Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts, also a history major, wrote “Marxism and Bolshevism: Theory and Practice” and “Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party's Approach to the Social Problem,” The Weekly Standard reported in 2005, when he was nominated.